To what extent has the music industry changed itself over the last 30 years?
First, congratulations to all those who have worked on this magazine over the 30 years that we celebrate with this issue. When I told my university tutor that I was aiming to become a classical music journalist, he said: ‘Forget it. Those jobs will disappear in five years.’ That was in 1976. Somehow, we stagger on. People still want to read about music, thank goodness, as well as perform and listen to it. They still want to be stimulated, provoked, amused, perhaps even annoyed. Over the decades I have certainly learnt more from readers’ comments, encouraging or vitriolic, than they have ever learnt from me. The day this dialogue around classical music ceases is the day I will worry seriously about the future of the artform itself.
How has the musical world changed since 1992? In some ways, it’s been surprisingly stable. Britain still has all the major orchestras and opera companies it had 30 years ago, even if some of them seem to hover eternally on the brink of insolvency. When you consider all the financial crises the country has been through, that’s a remarkable tribute to the resilience and flexibility of British musicians and the poor, frazzled souls whose job is to manage them.
I would even argue that the orchestral and opera world is a lot more varied now than in 1992. Orchestras of young players, determined to do things differently, have lit up the scene – think of the Britten Sinfonia, Manchester Collective, Aurora and Southbank Sinfonia. Alongside them, a host of little opera companies have transformed mainstream (and not so mainstream) repertoire by taking it into unexpected venues – pubs, warehouses, even the streets. It’s worth pointing out, too, that venues everywhere – large and small – have been transformed by money from the National Lottery, which was only being vaguely talked about in 1992. I still have qualms about financing the arts from the proceeds of a gambling operation drawing largely on the budgets of less affluent families, but it’s hard to imagine how such essential regional culture-palaces as the Sage Gateshead, the Lowry in Salford or Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre could have been built without Lottery money.
Two more revolutions have transformed the classical music business. It’s hard now to recall how white and male it was, even in the last decade of the 20th century. Few women conductors flourished at the top level, and even women instrumental soloists were a small minority. Women composers hardly featured on programmes, nor did composers
